“Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape; you can still see very little but you can smell the earth and feel the wind blowing.”

Guilt keeps people imprisoned in themselves.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one’s luck.

Art and psychoanalisis give shape and meaning to life and that’s why we adore them. However, life as it is lived has no shape nor meaning, and that’s what I am experiencing right now.

But one must do something about the past. It doesn’t just cease to be. It goes on existing and affecting the present, and in new and different ways, as if in some other dimension it too were growing.

We defend ourselves with descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.

Reading and writing and the preservation of language and its forms and the kind of eloquence and the kind of beauty which the language is capable of is terribly important to the human beings because this is connected to thought.

Every persisting marriage is based on fear’, said Peregrine. ‘Fear is fundamental, you dig down in human nature and what’s at the bottom? Mean spiteful cruel self-regarding fear, whether it makes you to put the foot in it or whether it makes you to cower.

Only take someone’s hand in a certain way, even look into their eyes in a certain way, and the world is changed forever.

Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.

Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.

This sort of quiet gazing, which was like a feeding of the heart.

I felt a deep grief that crouched and stayed still as if it was afraid to move.

What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone’s company you love them.

Love doesn’t think like that. All right, it’s blind as a bat- Bats have radar. Yours doesnt seem to be working.

What an extraordinary satisfaction there is in cleaning things! (Does the satisfaction depend on ownership? I suspect so.

The talk of lovers who have just declared their love is one of life’s most sweet delights. Each vies with the other in humility, in amazement at being so valued. The past is searched for the first signs and each one is in haste to declare all that he is so that no part of his being escapes the hallowing touch.

When you read the book you see that these guys aren’t holding any punches. They’re straightforward. They’re honest. They’re giving you their honest opinion.

I do things differently, because I don’t go by a rule book, because I lead from the heart, not the head, and albeit that’s got me into trouble in my work, I understand that.

Why will people go astray when they have this blessed Book to guide them?

To travel far, there is no better ship than a book.

If you are open-minded and ready to learn, there are many things which you can learn not only from books and instructors but from the very life experience itself.

I go into the Upanishads to ask questions.

The book of nature which we have to read is written by the finger of God.

Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence.